The field of online advertising is both well-known and well-studied. In general, there are three primary types of online advertisements: banner advertisements, search result advertisements, and contextual advertisements, all of which appear on various web pages and other online locations on the Internet. Advertisements play a major economic role on the Web, and advertisers may pay for advertisements based on measures such as number of views or “impressions,” numbers of click-throughs received, or numbers of products sold or customers contacted as a result of ads. Advertisers thus often have an economic incentive to increase the interest in their ads, the number of click-throughs that their ads receive, and the ultimate conversion of these click-throughs into some kind of event or transaction valuable to advertisers.
Today, Internet advertisements are displayed in a web page or other online locations with little or no additional information about the advertiser, advertisement, or good or service that is being advertised. This can leave the viewer of the advertisement with limited information and a number of questions about the advertisement or good or service that is being advertised.
For example, viewers of online advertisements do not know if an advertisement or the destination Web page or Web site that it leads to are trustworthy. For example, the ad itself or the destination landing page or site may contain dangerous software such as malware, which may perform undesired and/or unauthorized acts; it may have been hacked, or deliver unwanted “drive-by” exploits; it may contain misleading or fraudulent information or may take steps to compromise a user's privacy, and so on. As another example, the viewer has no indication of how useful other viewers found the advertisement. The viewers also may not know a reputation and historical performance of a specific advertiser or company, or how advertised products or services compare to those of the competition. The viewer may further not be aware of a size, location, age, maturity, etc. of the business that is advertising a good or service.
In the particular case of malware, online advertisements, as well as the destination websites that these advertisements direct viewers to, can be infected with software that performs malicious and/or other undesired acts without the knowledge or permission of the viewer. As the public becomes more and more aware of this danger, the need for additional information about an advertisement, the advertiser or the good and/or service that is being advertised grows. There appears therefore to be currently no convenient mechanism that provides additional information from a third party about online advertisements and/or destination websites.
Furthermore, current viewers of online advertisements appear to have no means of gaining additional information about a particular advertisement, the advertiser, and/or the good and/or service being advertised. The viewer typically must rely on the advertisement alone when making a decision as to whether to click on the advertisement or not. This can have negative effects on the effectiveness of the advertisements, in particular in the click-through rates of those advertisements. By comparison, a user who can verify that an advertisement, an advertiser, a good or service, or a destination Web page or Web site are in fact trustworthy or more positive due to some other characteristic may be more likely to click on that ad, an action to the benefit of the advertiser. Therefore, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.